Alan Broadbent: Making his own arrangements

Grammy award-winner Alan Broadbent is this country's most successful jazz export but it's still a struggle,
he tells GRAHAM REID

It gladdened Alan Broadbent's heart. Returning home to Los Angeles last month after a European tour as pianist with the group Quartet West - widely considered one of the world's finest jazz quartets - he noticed that on the in-flight entertainment was an episode of Ken Burns' recent documentary series Jazz.

"And quite a few young people were looking at Benny Goodman and being curious about this stuff. You know, there's something in this music deeper than the ephemeral, corporate music being produced now. And people do get it, given a chance. They know there's something there deeper than what is being spoonfed to them."

On paper such comments might look like bitter, but that's not Broadbent's manner. His words are considered and delivered with a sad-sounding, detached ennui, a weary acceptance of the way this world often doesn't acknowledge intellectual art but will pay homage to bombastic artifice.

Softly spoken and good-humoured, this jazz composer, arranger and pianist - who performs with, and conducts, the Auckland Philharmonia at the Aotea Centre next Saturday - sometimes struggles to articulate his ideas as he speaks of the music which has sustained him. "I play the stuff and write it, but to talk about it is always difficult."

Classically trained, the former Onehunga boy certainly does play and write this stuff - and had done even before he won a scholarship to Berklee School of Music in Boston as a 17-year-old in 1965. He'd left Marcellin College at 15 and was an apprentice signwriter by day, but came alive at night when playing in the house trio at the Embers nightclub in Auckland.

In Boston he was admitted to the honours class in 1967, played local clubs, studied with jazz pianist/arranger Lennie Tristano in New York, and by the early 70s was on the road with Woody Herman's band. At the time this famous group's star was in decline and playing jazz-rock in rundown clubs, but it was through Herman's Herd that Broadbent came to wider recognition.

For it he wrote ambitious charts including the 10-minute Blues in the Night and a 25-minute jazz-rock suite, and in 1976 was nominated for a Grammy for his composition The Children of Lima, recorded by the Herman band and the Houston Symphony Orchestra.

After journeyman work in the late 70s writing and performing television and soundtrack music in Hollywood, he worked with Nelson Riddle and Percy Faith, and subsequently played with a roll-call of jazz greats including Art Pepper, Chet Baker and Don Cherry. In the 90s he became musical director for Natalie Cole, joined bassist Charlie Haden's Quartet West, and racked up an impressive seven Grammy nominations, including two wins for arrangements for Cole and the quartet.

He has appeared on around two dozen albums, about half leading groups under his name.

Yet despite his profile and acclaim, at 54 and with a 21-month-old son, Broadbent still finds himself "between jobs" occasionally. His trio in Los Angeles, where he has lived for 25 years, is "currently unemployed" and "Life is as it has always been, a week of intense work and in the two weeks off you wonder if you'll ever work again."

Grammys aren't necessarily passports to other work, but Broadbent has realised some personal dreams, notably writing and arranging for an orchestra.

In February, and it is a measure of the high international regard in which Broadbent is held, he arranged tunes by Jewish-American composers to be sung by New York singer Michael Feinstein which they then performed and recorded in Tel Aviv with the Israel Philharmonic.

"It was just before the recent troubles and every day for about a week I was walking up and down that strip where all those kids were killed [by a Palestinian bus driver]. Just horrible," he says, admitting that when growing up in Auckland he knew little of Judaism but has become engaged by the culture since meeting his Jewish wife.

"And playing Jewish composers with a Jewish singer in Israel was an honour. That was Lenny Bernstein's orchestra, and of course Zubin [Mehta] has it now.

"The arrangements were symphonic, not background or 'sweetening' as we used to call it, and Michael gave me a lot of old movie arrangers' music that he knew but I had never really followed, like the arrangement for Singing in the Rain. It was inspiring to hear how they arranged in their particular styles.

"Being a fan of Mahler I was able to combine my sentiments with what Michael needed on these lovely old songs like Stormy Weather, How Deep is the Ocean, Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out To Dry, and The Folks Who Live on the Hill.

"They are wonderful melodies and a musician can reharmonise them and feel his own way through them, so I was able to translate feelings from my jazz experience into my arranging."

When Broadbent plays with the Auckland Philharmonia they will preview some of these arrangements, but he also brings longtime bassist Putter Smith and saxophonist Gary Foster from his LA band to join Auckland drummer Frank Gibson jun in a quartet set of jazz standards such as Miles Davis and Bill Evans' Blue in Green and John Coltrane's Naima. The programme will include two Broadbent originals, the older Ode to the Road and Lady in the Lake which he recorded with Quartet West.

That group will record again soon - "Charlie has the idea of doing our version of the Charlie Parker with Strings album but the producer isn't sure we should be doing another string album. I think that's financial." After his Auckland appearances Broadbent goes across Canada as musical director for jazz chanteuse Diana Krall.

Work as Cole's director and conductor has dried up, however: "She's changed her show and my beautiful orchestral arrangements are now being played on a couple of synthesisers. She's doing a mixture of things plus a few hip-hop songs. It's not like the old days, when Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole wanted to do something they'd get a band together and basically did what they did."

He is delighted to return to Auckland after a three-year absence and again play with a real orchestra at their invitation.

"They are a brilliant orchestra and I think highly underrated, and I love the programme. I've been playing these tunes all my life so I'm not trying to recreate another arranger's style. I have my own voice as it were and my harmonies are my harmonies and my counterpoint is the way I feel about music now.

"Perhaps to an 18-year-old hip-hop musician it might seem very old-fashioned, but even though the tunes were written in the 30s and 40s they have this ability to transport themselves into the time of the musician who is playing them now.

"Jazz musicians have been playing these songs for years, and it will always be like that as long as there is another young musician who has something to say about them, a new way of phrasing them, or is playing his own lines over the chord changes. That's what I love about these songs, they're always alive."